"Russian media outlets have treated Bush's visit as a slap in the face to Moscow, and some Georgian politicians agree. Timur Grigalishvili, a spokesman for Georgia's governing National Movement Party, said Bush's trip to Georgia will show Russian President Vladimir Putin that Moscow can no longer treat its southern neighbor like an extension of its own territory. 'With this visit, the president of the United States is announcing that Georgia is a partner of America and a friend of the United States,' Grigalishvili said. 'That has huge meaning.'"

"… pluralism in Georgia had little to do with democracy. The pluralism of Shevardnadze's administration was, first and foremost, a pluralism of often incompatible private interests. As such it was an elite phenomenon that had no relationship with ordinary citizens. … Moreover, given that tolerance of graft and corruption was used as a mechanism for control, the incumbents feared that were they to lose elections they would not only lose their power but also their liberty." (p. 134)

Wheatley offers a good analysis of the different pressures that finally produced the revolution in 2003. He also argues that despite many changes brought by Saakashvili's presidency, the new president has still not broken with the illiberal tendencies of his predecessors.

"The crucial question is whether the Rose Revolution, despite replacing Shevardnadze as an individual, can really change the 'system Shevardnadze' that proved so destructive to the Georgian state. Unfortunately it is still too soon to tell whether the old rules of the game will still determine the behavior of the new leadership."

Wheatley concludes:

"Of course the development of democracy takes time and depends to a large extent on society's own capacity to define its own interests and to act in their own defence  a capacity which, as we have observed, remained weak in Georgia. On whether progress is being made in this direction, the jury is still out."

It is useful to see events in Georgia in the context of other "electoral revolutions" which took place between 1996 and 2004. There is now a rich and interesting literature on these velvet or "color" revolutions.

"Another remarkable thing about these democratic breakthroughs is how few analysts predicted them. To many it seemed a miracle that Serbian democratic forces could overcome a decade of disunity in order first to beat Milosevic in a presidential election on 24 September 2000, and then to galvanize hundreds of thousands of citizens to demand that the actual election result be honored when it became clear that Milosevic was trying to falsify it. Similarly dramatic events unfolded in Georgia after Shevardnadze tried to steal the November 2003 parliamentary elections, leading to his resignation as president and a landslide victory for opposition leader Mikheil Saakashvili in a hastily scheduled January 2004 balloting."

"In most of the successful cases, in which authoritarian leaders have been removed from office as the result of electoral revolutions, the model has built on the long-term development and organizational capabilities of civil society … youthful activists brought fresh approaches, new techniques, and a great deal of energy to the campaigns to unseat unpopular and often corrupt authoritarian regimes."

Another interesting article is Paul Manning's "Rose-Colored Glasses? Color Revolutions and Cartoon Chaos in Post Socialist Georgia (2007)", in Cultural Anthropology. Manning sees the turning point leading to the Rose Revolution in late 2001:

"In November 2001, Georgian students held large meetings protesting a raid by government forces on the offices of a popular television channel, Rustavi 2, which ended in defeat for the government as the channel broadcast the raid live over the air. Two movements emerged from these protests: the 'National Movement' of the politicians Mikheil Saakashvili (now president of Georgia) and the student movement later to be called Kmara! (Enough)."

His article also discusses the impact that the cartoon series Dardubala, shown from 2000 on Sunday nights on Rustavi 2, had on undermining Shevardandze's image:

"Each week, this motley representation of Georgia in miniature confronts real, possible or purely fantastic problems faced by Georgia, ranging from popular insurrections, economic deficits, and Russian spies to alien invasions, Godzilla-like monsters, genies in bottles, and time machines …. The central joke of each episode is that, in effect, Eduard is always trying to solve a post-socialist problem that is, in one sense of another, his own legacy from the socialist period."

In one episode, which sees Georgia being invaded by aliens, Eduard Shevardnadze proposes to infect the aliens with a secret "corruption virus" that he had developed in the 1960s:

"Then the alien shows that he has become fully Georgianized, that is, corrupt, by announcing a general willingness to accept money …. In the final scene, Shevardnadze, against a backdrop of a destroyed Tbilisi, proclaims to the people of Georgia that he has always believed in the positive value of corruption. He proclaims, 'Corruption will save Georgia.'"

The inventor of the Dardubala series, Shalva Ramishvili, became a critic of the government after the Rose Revolution, and in a new cartoon series showed Saakashvili, among other things, as an oriental sultan. He was arrested in 2005 on corruption charges and sentenced to four years in prison for extortion.

"When he was elected president of Georgia after a bloodless revolution in 2003, he was deemed a savior for the post-Soviet landscape, as if he had been conjured by a committee of Washington think tanks and European human rights groups. Yet this week, with Georgia under a state of emergency after his government quashed a large demonstration and violently shut an opposition television station, Mr. Saakashvili seemed, even in the eyes of some steadfast supporters, to be ruling with the willfulness of the very autocrats that he once so disdained."

Miriam Lanskoy and Giorgi Areshidze describe a similar change in perception following the war in August 2008 in "Georgia's Year of Turmoil",Journal of Democracy, Vol. 19/4, October 2008

"Saakashvili sees himself as a founding father and great reformer in the vein of authoritarian state builders such as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He has portrayed himself as a pivotal figure in Georgian history, comparable to David the Builder, the twelfth century king who is celebrated for uniting Georgian territories and driving out foreign invaders while improving the administration of the state … the many constitutional amendments since 2004, however, have vested the preponderance of power in the executive alone. Thus the laudable achievements of Saakasvhili's state-building program have come at the high price of a super-presidential political system. The government acts unilaterally according to the principle that 'the ends justify the means'."